However, it's the first popular and heavily backed ARM CPU which can compete with high end x86.

> Most distros and OSS have dealt with the issues on arm already.

I also use a lot of ARM based SBCs for a long time but, running a scientific application fast is not the same thing as booting Linux or making it reasonably performant/stable.

My day job and personal research is involved with supercomputers a lot. So I live in parallel applications / architectures. There are certain scientific applications which run considerably faster in previous generation hardware when compared to current-gen ones, because they're heavily tuned for that generation's memory subsystem latencies and IPC characteristics (fetch, retire capacities and pipeline latencies to be exact). This sometimes implies that the code contains proper hints or hand-tuned asm for speed-critical sections. Eigen is a very good example of this optimization. It optimizes itself during compilation by compiling the architecture optimized paths with hints in the code and help of the compiler.

So, having an ARM CPU which can surpass x86 will make these communities to take note of it. I'm not sure how Eigen performs on M1 for example (will see soon enough), or other software packages which are optimized for x86 extensively.

These software packages will start to get optimizations for M1 or Apple silicon since it's pretty popular amongst scientists due to its POSIX nature and hardware quality.

At the end of the day; yes, it's a glorified Raspberry Pi, but with looks and performance of a supercar, so it'll attract a different kind of user base and development effort.